Is
Corinthian Colleges’ recent bankruptcy a sign of the end times for the for-profit university industry? As the
Washington Postrecently put it, proprietary institutions everywhere are currently “
buckling under government lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny and depressed student enrollment.” So, provided that the Obama administration makes clear that Corinthian’s victims are entitled to debt relief, will purveyors of legitimate education start to feel like we’ve been raptured up to a heaven bereft of predatory education?
Maybe. Since 2014 (well, really since 2009, but more on that in a minute), the Obama administration has taken a relatively hardline stance on the least scrupulous of the for-profits. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told me in a recent conversation, these institutions
lobby aggressively on “both sides of the aisle”; the industry has
enough friends in Washington that a majority of the House of Representatives voted to
block regulationsthat President Obama attempted to instate in 2009.
* These regulations stipulated, among other things, that proprietary institutions that claim to provide career training need to furnish proof that their graduates found “gainful employment,” defined in terms of a reasonable debt-to-income ratio and the ability to repay loans on time. The regulations were finally enacted—among much protest from for-profits—last year.
Corinthian was discovered gaming the gainful-employment requirement by, say,
hiring its students out to temp agencies for two days or counting Taco Bell as relevant employ in the field. Thus I can see why the industry fought the regulations with such vehemence. Now the Obama administration wants to add to for-profits’ tribulations by closing loopholes in the current
“90/10” rule, a federal law mandating they receive no more than 90 percent of their funding from federal student aid programs.
Wait, what?More than
what percent of
what now?
It seems that some for-profits have
used loopholes that allow them to get
more than 90 percent—because just 90 percent is insufficient—of their funding from the federal teat. Funding that is usually loans. And these loans, lest I remind you,
often go unpaid. “To be very clear,” says Duncan, “this is taxpayer dollars. This is your money.”
You and I, my friends, are just handing cash over to the University of Phoenixes of the world, because they can’t even manage to get 10 percent of their funding from anyone but us. We might as well be saying,
Hey, I trust you will use this to make yourself rich and put people from vulnerable populations in massive debt, all in the name of an education that promised to give them a shot at a better life but is 100 percent doing the opposite.